Introduction

In March 2005, Philips Semiconductors announced "the industry's first integrated PCI Express dual global video and stereo decoder for digital home PC desktops and notebooks" (press release). The new analog decoder chip, the saa7162, uses the increased bandwidth of the PCI Express bus to capture to two simultaneous analog channels of live tv or baseband video (cf. product flyer) or up to four independent simultaneous digital TV streams (cf. Philips/NXP SAA7162 product brief).

In Oct 2006, NXP created a saa7162 product page that includes, amongst other information, an 18 page "preliminary short data sheet" for download:
SAA7162 Product Description.

Supported Cards

According to Philips' reference design, Philips themselves have produced a Linux driver. In May 2007 Richard Dale finally succeeded in obtaining the v1.0 driver set. The good news is that the code is under the GPL license; the bad news is that it's not yet in decent shape. Check up on Richard's site for updates.

This means there's still no released Linux driver for the saa7162, but support for PCIe cards incorporating the sa7162 chip is getting closer.